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Obama Reshapes White House for Domestic Focus

President-elect Barack Obama rounded out his picks for top posts: from left, Ron Kirk, Hilda Solis, Ray LaHood and Karen Mills.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama finished building a cabinet of prominent and strong-willed players on Friday, but he is putting together a governing structure that will concentrate more decision making over his top domestic priorities in the White House.

With new offices in the White House to coordinate health care, urban policy and energy initiatives, Mr. Obama has signaled that he intends to keep real power over domestic issues close at hand. The collective moves shift the political center of gravity farther away from the cabinet, a trend that has accelerated under presidents of both parties in recent years.

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s reorganization suggests a willingness to tolerate, and even encourage, competing power centers within his administration, but it is unclear how that will work in practice. Not only is he creating new positions with authority over key areas, he is filling his West Wing with people of stature equal to or even greater than the members of his cabinet, including two former cabinet officers and a former Senate majority leader.

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said issues like health care and energy “are so fundamental to our ability to right the economy in the long term that he knows he’s going to have to drive a lot of that. And he wants a high-powered staff in the White House to help him do that.”

While there may be some push-and-pull between the White House and cabinet departments, Mr. Axelrod said the president-elect had emphasized during job interviews his insistence on cohesion. “He encourages debate,” Mr. Axelrod said. “He doesn’t tolerate factionalism.”

The revamped arrangement indicates a shift in priorities away from those of President Bush, who spent much of his tenure fashioning a new national security apparatus in a time of war and terrorist threats. Mr. Obama’s transition team is even considering undoing some of what Mr. Bush built in terms of security structures in the White House.

Transition officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said they were thinking about folding the White House Homeland Security Council, which Mr. Bush established, into the National Security Council, seeing that as potentially more efficient. And they may reassign responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan back to the national security adviser instead of keeping the separate “war czar” position created 19 months ago.

Mr. Obama and his advisers have not made decisions on those ideas and are wary of sending a message that they are somehow letting their guard down seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks or taking the fighting overseas for granted. Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, has privately urged the Obama team to keep the Homeland Security Council.

Transition officials said Mr. Obama would still make national security a central priority regardless of how he reshapes the White House. But they said the incoming president could not afford to keep the same organization as his predecessor with the economy in crisis and climate change on the rise.

“After eight years of a White House that had only a sporadic interest in the domestic front, Obama has made clear that he’s going to be attacking domestic problems on all cylinders,” said Bruce Reed, head of President Bill Clinton’s Domestic Policy Council and now president of the Democratic Leadership Council.

“He’s setting up a very strong White House staff structure, and most of the major policy decisions are going to be made in the White House,” said Frank J. Donatelli, who worked in Ronald Reagan’s White House. “If you’re going to be as active as he’s apparently planning to be on the domestic side, there’s no other way you can do it.”

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Mr. Obama completed his cabinet choices on Friday, confirming that he would nominate Representative Hilda L. Solis of California as labor secretary, Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois as transportation secretary and former Mayor Ron Kirk of Dallas as United States trade representative. He also announced that he would make Karen Mills, a venture capitalist from Maine, the head of the Small Business Administration.

With that, Mr. Obama has finished selecting his core team faster than any president-elect in decades. In trying to balance various constituencies and backgrounds, he assembled a 15-member cabinet that includes six current or former members of Congress, three current or former governors and two Republicans, including Mr. LaHood.

Under pressure to increase ethnic and gender diversity, Mr. Obama picked three women and three Hispanics for his cabinet, with Ms. Solis counting in both categories. He named two Asian-Americans and one African-American. (Other officials will also be given a cabinet rank.)

Beyond the cabinet, every new president puts his stamp on the White House itself to suit his priorities and the imperatives of his era. The National Security Council was created under Harry S. Truman. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy was created under Reagan. The National Economic Council was created by Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Obama is building new offices to coordinate his plans to expand health care, promote clean energy and reinvigorate urban policy. His choices to fill those posts also suggest how much influence they will have. He named a former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, as health care czar, and a former Environmental Protection Agency director, Carol M. Browner, as energy czar.

And he effectively bolstered the clout of the National Economic Council by installing a former Treasury secretary, Lawrence H. Summers, to lead that office.

What remains unclear is how these prominent White House officials will share responsibility with the relevant department and agency heads. Mr. Summers once led the Treasury Department, but that job now falls to Timothy F. Geithner, who used to work for him in the Clinton administration. Ms. Browner likewise once led the E.P.A. but now a former subordinate, Lisa P. Jackson, will direct the agency.

Mr. Daschle, cognizant of Mr. Clinton’s failure to overhaul health care in the 1990s, insisted on taking the White House job in addition to his nomination as secretary of health and human services. He will have an office in the West Wing and will attend Mr. Obama’s morning senior staff meetings when possible, Democrats close to the situation said.

Robert E. Rubin, who served as Mr. Clinton’s Treasury secretary, made a habit of going to the White House each morning for those staff meetings, giving him greater access to decision making. One Democrat close to the transition said Mr. Geithner might duplicate that practice.

“So much of it is symbolic,” said Karen M. Hult, a Virginia Tech political science professor who has written books on the evolution of the White House staff. “You want to get close to the president because it signals to others that it’s a top political priority and the person really has the president’s ear. Now, of course, the more people you have like that, the less likely they really are to have the president’s ear.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Reshaping White House With a Domestic Focus. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe